In computer graphic systems, a triangle strip, or tristrip, is a series of connected triangles where each triangle shares two vertices with the preceding triangle. The first three indices define a triangle and then each additional vertex defines another triangle. By convention the first triangle is right handed and then the handedness flips for each successive triangle. Tristrips and other similar primitives, e.g., trifans, are much faster to render using graphics libraries like OpenGL where a tristrip with n triangles is specified by n+2 vertices, that is, typically significantly less than the 3n vertices required to encode n triangles independently.
OpenGL is a graphics library utilized on many popular graphics cards and optimized on the respective GPUs, a graphics processing units that is a dedicated graphics rendering device. OpenGL has an immediate-mode rendering capability that utilizes indexed arrays that render utilizing vertices from unique vertex records. Further, GPUs typically have a vertex cache that maintains a cache of recent pre-transformed vertices where primitives are arranged so that repeated uses of a given vertex happens close to another.
What is needed is a system and method for storing primitive information in an indexed array that not only removes the number of redundant vertices but also reduces the array size to take advantage of graphics libraries and GPUs for faster rendering.